kansas

When Bob Harte took his two young kids shopping with him at an organic gardening store in Kansas City, Missouri, he had no idea that he had inadvertently set in motion a series of events that would — eight months later — lead to the Harte family watching helplessly as armed sheriff’s deputies searched every corner of their house for nonexistent evidence of a marijuana grow operation. [More]

The geographic center of the United States, as all elementary school students know, is in Kansas. When some services that map a device’s Internet Protocol address don’t know where someone using a website is located, they point to the front yard of a farm in Kansas. The octogenarian owner and her tenants had no idea until recently why they were being harassed. [More]

Imagine you’re at a fast food joint and you’re taking your young child to the bathroom. Of all the possible things you could find in the lavatory, one of the least-expected would probably be whole trays of buns for hamburgers and hot dogs. [More]

“The Bible condemns gaining wealth through usury; and the writers of Scripture warn about gaining wealth through exploiting the poor… [but] The State of Alabama allows Payday lenders to charge an annual interest rate of 456%.”

A small city in Kansas has a fiber network that currently serves local government and civic buildings. They also have a plan in mind to expand that network and offer inexpensive gigabit fiber connections to every resident and business. That’s great news for the locals, but not such great news for the incumbent ISP, AT&T, which has won the right to “intervene” in the process.

As we mentioned earlier today, 20 states have laws on the books that ban or severely limit municipal efforts to launch broadband services that compete with the likes of Comcast, Time Warner Cable and their cronies. And several states, including Kansas, are trying to enact industry-backed laws of their own to prevent cities from offering competitive Internet service. Comcast was supposed to be showing off its home security service at the home of the Kansas lawmaker who introduced that state’s ridiculous legislation, but has backed out of it after the media started asking questions. [More]

Cable lobbyists seem to be buckling under the pressure of consumer unrest in Kansas. Last week, the Kansas Cable Telecommunications Association announced a protectionist bill that would all but squash some city’s hopes of getting improved broadband service. [More]

The Kansas state legislature is currently considering a bill that would prohibit municipalities in that state from building out their own municipal broadband networks. Completely coincidentally of course we’re sure, Kansas City is home to the country’s first Google Fiber municipal network.

Everyone has an opinion on Walmart and the impact it has on a community whenever a new store is opened. But some residents of Kansas City suburb say a former city councilman went too far when he recently distributed a letter claiming that a new Walmart in the area would attract an undesirable element and ultimately result in a drop in property values. [More]

All those morons sitting in jail right now because they got caught trying to rob a fast food joint are going to feel silly when they hear about the guy in Kansas who drove off with a bag full of KFC’s cash when all he wanted was some fried chicken.

That’s “dam maintenance” not “damn maintenance. A Kansas couple scored what they thought was their dream home for $300,000: 20 acres with a beautiful view of the lush foilage-surrounded lake, bound in by a dam. A dam that has tree roots digging into it and could cost $900,000 to repair. And, under an agreement with the city from the 70’s that never turned up in the title search, is their responsibility to repair. And, title insurance will only cover the first $330,000.

Every year GMAC ranks the average scores of their national driver’s test by state — and this year Kansas had the smartest drivers and New York the dumbest. Here are the top 5 and bottom 5 from the ranking: